Investing in the long term

San Francisco investor Peter A. Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) is putting $3.5 million into the anti-aging research pioneered by Aubrey de Grey, who spoke at my conference TEDGLOBAL last year (see past posts on him). The money will come in annual installments of $500,000 over the next three years for a pilot project, plus matching money for every dollar donated by others to de Grey's foundation. It is not known whether there are strings attached to the donation. It seems to me, however, that consistency with the scope of de Grey's research would have Thiel transfer the money in installments of, say, $10 a day over the next 1000 years.

Comments

[aubrey]

The unconditional donation is actually only $500k total over the three years, i.e. $167k per year. It is this money that will be mainly used to fund research on preserving mitochondrial function. The remaining $3m will be spent on a broad range of projects spanning the SENS (see www.sens.org) panel of projects.

There are no strings attached to either the $500k or the $3m, other than that the $3m is a 1:2 matching pledge as described above.

$10/year would have been, um, less effective!